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To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.

It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around.

—Flannery O’Connor Frustration Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.

—William Butler Yeats Country Roads

“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Stripped of their context, my words sounded heartless. Republican operatives made sure the clip was replayed virtually nonstop on Facebook feeds, local radio and television coverage, and campaign ads across Appalachia for months.

I made this unfortunate comment about coal miners at a town hall in Columbus just two days before the Ohio primary. You say millions of words in a campaign and you do your best to be clear and accurate. Sometimes it just comes out wrong. It wasn’t the first time that happened during the 2016 election, and it wouldn’t be the last. But it is the one I regret most. The point I had wanted to make was the exact opposite of how it came out.

The context is important. The moderator asked how I would win support from working-class whites who normally vote Republican. Good question! I had a lot to say about that. I was looking right at my friend, Congressman Tim Ryan, who represents communities in southeastern Ohio suffering from job losses in coal mines and steel plants. I wanted to speak to their concerns and share my ideas for bringing new opportunities to the region. Unfortunately, a few of my words came out in the worst possible way:

Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities. So, for example, I’m the only candidate who has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into Coal Country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right Tim? And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

If you listened to the full answer and not just that one garbled sentence pulled out of it, my meaning comes through reasonably well. Coal employment had been going down in Appalachia for decades, stemming from changes in mining technology, competition from lower-sulfur Wyoming coal, and cheaper and cleaner natural gas and renewable energy, and a drop in the global demand for coal. I was intensely concerned about the impact on families and communities that had depended on coal jobs for generations. That’s why I had proposed a comprehensive $30 billion plan to help revitalize and diversify the region’s economy. But most people never heard that. They heard a snippet that gave the impression that I was looking forward to hurting miners and their families.

If you were already primed to believe the worst about me, here was confirmation.

I felt absolutely sick about the whole thing. I clarified and apologized and pointed to my detailed plan to invest in coal communities. But the damage was done.

For many people, coal miners were symbols of something larger: a vision of a hardworking, God-fearing, flag-waving, blue-collar white America that felt like it was slipping away. If I didn’t respect coal miners, the implication was that I didn’t respect working-class people generally or at least not working-class white men in small towns and red states. And with the clip of my comments playing on a loop on Fox News, there was basically nothing I could say to make people think otherwise.

The backlash was infuriating for many reasons. For one, there was the double standard. Donald Trump hardly went a single day on the campaign trail without saying something offensive or garbling a thought. He received criticism, but it rarely stuck (with a couple of big exceptions). Many in the press and political chattering class marveled at how Teflon-coated Trump seemed to be, ignoring their own role in making him so. I got none of this leeway. Even the smallest slipup was turned into a major event. Yet at the same time, I was routinely criticized for being too cautious and careful with my words. It was an unwinnable dynamic.

But the coal-mining gaffe felt terrible in ways that went beyond my normal frustrations over double standards. This wasn’t some dumb comment about an unimportant issue. I genuinely cared a lot about struggling working-class families in fading small towns. I cared a lot about coal communities in particular. Not for political reasons—I knew I wasn’t going to win a lot of votes in places like West Virginia—but for personal ones.

I lived in Arkansas for years and fell in love with Ozark mountain towns a lot like those across Appalachia. In fact, coal had been mined in Arkansas for decades, and Bill and I knew retired miners suffering from black lung disease. As an attorney, he had represented more than a hundred of them, trying to help them get the benefits they deserved. When I got to the Senate, I worked with Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia to do what I could to support legislation to protect the safety and pensions of coal miners.

I also represented once-prosperous industrial cities in upstate New York where factories had closed and jobs dried up, just like in southeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. I respected the defiant pride that so many who lived there felt for their hometowns and understood the mistrust they felt toward outsiders swooping in with grand pronouncements about their lives and futures. I found that by listening, building coalitions, and helping people to help themselves, we could start turning things around and create new opportunities for businesses and jobs. I worked with eBay to help small businesses in rural upstate communities get online and reach new customers. My office connected chefs and restaurant owners from Manhattan with farmers and winemakers in the Hudson Valley and the Finger Lakes in an effort to expand sales. And we worked with upstate universities to bring in new research grants that could help them become hubs for job-creating industries such as biotech and clean energy. I loved that work because it produced results and made people’s lives better.

Appearing to dismiss the men and women of Coal Country—or any Americans working hard against the odds to build better lives for themselves and their families—wasn’t something I could just shrug off. This really bothered me, and I wanted badly to do something about it.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to be clear about the bigger picture. Terms like “working class” and “blue collar” get thrown around a lot and can mean different things to different people. Generally, when academics and political analysts talk about the working class, they mean people without a college degree. But frequently people use the term in a broader way. How much money people make, the kinds of jobs they do, the communities they live in, and a basic sensibility or set of values all get wrapped up together in our image of what it means to be working class. And there’s often a tendency to equate working class with white and rural. How we think and talk about this has big implications for our politics.

I came of age in an era when Republicans won election after election by peeling off formerly Democratic white working-class voters. Bill ran for President in 1992 determined to prove that Democrats could compete in blue-collar suburbs and rural small towns without giving up our values. By focusing on the economy, delivering results, and crafting compromises that defused hot-button issues such as crime and welfare, he became the first Democrat since World War II to win two full terms.

By 2016, the country was more diverse, more urban, and more college-educated, with working-class whites making up a shrinking portion of the electorate. Barack Obama had written a new playbook about how to win the Presidency by mobilizing younger, more diverse voters. My campaign strategy was built on that playbook. But I still wanted to help those small towns that Bill had won twenty-four years before and the Rust Belt communities like those I had represented in the Senate. Even before the campaign began, I was focused on the shocking numbers of poor white women and men who were dying younger than their parents because of smoking, substance abuse, and suicide—what’s been called an epidemic of despair. This decline in life expectancy was unprecedented in the modern history of our country. It’s the kind of thing that happened in Russia after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Back in 2013 and 2014, I started talking about McDowell County, West Virginia, where more than one-third of the residents lived in poverty and only half had a high school degree. Jobs were scarce, and drug use was rampant. McDowell County was one of the poorest communities in the country, but lots of other small towns and rural areas were also dealing with stagnant wages and disappearing jobs. Social networks that provided support and structure in previous generations were weaker than ever, with schools failing, labor unions shrinking, jobs leaving, church attendance declining, trust in government falling, and families becoming more fractured. People trying to build a future in these hard-hit communities didn’t face just ceilings on their aspirations. It was as if the floor had collapsed beneath them, too.

What could be done to help? I pointed to an ambitious effort in McDowell County led by the American Federation of Teachers under president Randi Weingarten and nearly a hundred partners from the local community, government, business, labor, nonprofits, and foundations. They recognized that the problems McDowell faced with its schools, jobs, housing, infrastructure, and public health were all connected, so they had to work on all of them at the same time, with new investments, fresh thinking, and lots of hard work. Their public-private partnership, named Reconnecting McDowell, had no guarantee of success, but I thought the effort was exciting. After a few years, it showed real results: the high school graduation rate increased from about 72 percent to nearly 90 percent, while dropout rates and teen pregnancy declined. The schools were wired with broadband, homes were connected with fiber, and every middle school student received a laptop.

But even the best philanthropic effort was unlikely to turn the tide across Appalachia unless it was backed up by strong, effective policies at both the state and federal levels—something that Republicans in Congress and state legislatures never supported.

Appalachian coal mining jobs had been in a long decline, but between 2011 and 2016, the bottom fell out. Nationwide, coal production fell by 27 percent. Nearly sixty thousand coal miners and contractors lost their jobs, 40 percent of them in Kentucky and West Virginia alone. Big coal companies such as Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, and Alpha Natural Resources went bankrupt, threatening the pensions of thousands of retired miners.

This was a crisis that demanded a serious response. There was a tension between the urgent imperative to reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels, especially coal, that were the main cause of climate change and the need to help the communities whose livelihoods had long depended on producing those fuels. I believed it was possible and imperative to do both. As I would say later in that ill-fated town hall, we had to move away from coal, but we couldn’t move away from the hardworking people who kept America’s lights on and our factories churning for generations.

When I launched my campaign for President in June 2015, I specifically mentioned Coal Country and the need to help distressed communities make the transition to a more sustainable economic future. It was a call I’d repeat in nearly every speech I gave, all over the country.

I also got to work developing the detailed plan to invest $30 billion in revitalizing coal communities that I mentioned earlier. Consulting with national experts and local leaders, my team came up with great ideas for new incentives to attract jobs and industries to Appalachia, improving infrastructure and broadband internet, training programs that would lead to real jobs instead of worthless certificates, and more support for schools and students. We also worked with the United Mine Workers of America union on steps to hold the coal companies accountable and guarantee health care and a secure retirement for miners and their families. I spoke out publicly when the union said it would be helpful, and I exerted pressure behind the scenes when needed. In the end, Peabody Energy, one of the biggest coal companies, agreed to extend benefits for more than twelve thousand retired miners and their families. If I had won the election, I would have used the full power of the federal government to do even more.

No other candidate came close to this level of attention to the real challenges facing coal communities. On the left, Bernie Sanders advocated for leaving all fossil fuels in the ground, including coal. On the right, Donald Trump made promises about reopening mines but offered zero credible ideas for how he’d reverse decades of decline and job loss. So it was frustrating and painful that thanks in large part to my one unfortunate comment and opposition in West Virginia to President Obama’s executive order mandating a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, both of those candidates were far more popular in the state than I was.